Do Tabacco Companies Successfully Target Low Income Families
Dominick Weakley
Tobacco and lung cancer have long been linked to the melancholy death of over 70,000 men per year(CDC). There’s no doubt that while cigarette smoking among men has significantly lowered over the past couple decades, cigarettes hold a deadly grip on many Americans today. Anti-smoking campaigns like “Truth Initiative”, suggest that tobacco companies target specific demographics when advertising cigarettes. These demographics are rural low-income males in the southern United States. Tabacco companies have been known to spend more advertising money in low-income counties. In the past tobacco companies issued coupons in food stamps and gave out free cigarettes to children in public housing (Truth Initiative). As a result of these low-income southern counties, have some of the highest rates of lung cancer in the United States among men. Poverty stricken have become victims of a spike in lung cancer, due to the advertising tactics and increased investment of the tobacco industry.
Gallup reports that the states of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Mississippi posted the highest smoking rates in the United States. It is no surprise that these states are geographically considered the south. The counties within these states, however, are geographically polarized when it comes to poverty and lung cancer rates. In each of the three states, rural counties contain the highest rates of poverty and in most cases lung cancer as well. In the southwestern area of West Virginia, the highest lung cancer and poverty rates are reported, it is no surprise that in Kentucky, the state that posted the highest smoking rate (30.2%), both the epicenter of poverty and lung cancer rates in the southeastern part of the state. Tobacco companies are known to advertise to rural teens with images of cowboys and race cars knowing in these low-income areas people are less exposed to anti-smoking ads on television (CDC). With both sets of counties geographically close and in poverty-stricken rural areas, heavy advertising by tobacco companies should not come as a surprise. Mississippi however, proves to be an anomaly as its poverty rates are extremely high, but lung cancer rates are not.
I want to take a deeper look at the counties affected by lung cancer and poverty in these states. More specifically I want to focus on the rates of poverty in these counties. The mean poverty rates of the counties in the three states are some of the highest in the country. Thus the lung cancer and smoking rates can be directly linked to this.
##
## Call:
## lm_basic(formula = poverty ~ 1 + state, data = combine_cancer)
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -14.9607 -3.8607 -0.6283 3.9393 21.7393
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate
## (Intercept) 21.061
## statems 2.968
## statewv -1.514
##
## Residual standard error: 5.961 on 182 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.07435, Adjusted R-squared: 0.06418
## F-statistic: 7.309 on 2 and 182 DF, p-value: 0.0008843
While Mississippi posted the highest mean poverty rate, Clay county in Kentucky has the highest percentage of households below the poverty line with 42.8%. Using Clay county I compared it to the 15 counties with the highest lung cancer rates in MS, KY, and WV. Clay county surprisingly had one of the lowest lung cancer rates among the counties with the highest rates. Clay County, however, is not the only county that does not fit the relationship. Five other counties ranged outside the positive correlation between increased lung cancer and poverty rates. I believe this is a result of extreme poverty however as the spread of lung cancer cannot and will not always equalize the extreme rates of poverty, due to the small nature of randomness of the disease. Regardless of the five outliers, an overwhelming majority of counties follow the trend of high poverty rates and high lung cancer rates. Thousands of Americans in these rural counties are directly affected by the positive correlation between poverty and lung cancer. If tobacco companies continue their current advertising strategies more Americans will suffer the consequences.
## # A tibble: 15 x 16
## name state population breast colorectal prostate lung melanoma
## <chr> <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
## 1 bracken ky 8404 120 78.7 115 121 42.2
## 2 carroll ky 10776 138 63.9 83.7 121 38.3
## 3 clay ky 21160 120 55.5 157 119 17.2
## 4 estill ky 14406 131 55.3 94.0 125 24.8
## 5 floyd ky 38144 114 58.5 110 149 16.8
## 6 grayson ky 26092 121 70.2 86.9 130 25.4
## 7 harlan ky 28031 89.1 56.9 86.0 128 20.4
## 8 jackson ky 13357 124 63.3 128 118 21.2
## 9 knox ky 31740 88.8 53.2 117 125 18.7
## 10 letcher ky 23382 93.7 66.7 78.1 118 18.3
## 11 mason ky 17229 131 65.8 125 124 24.2
## 12 ohio ky 24152 131 53.2 124 125 23.2
## 13 perry ky 27818 121 56.1 108 140 17.8
## 14 pike ky 62791 123 55.3 65.5 123 21.5
## 15 whitley ky 35842 102 48.0 120 122 23.3
## # ... with 8 more variables: poverty <dbl>, income <int>, region <chr>,
## # black_alone <dbl>, white_alone <dbl>, asian_alone <dbl>, lat <dbl>,
## # lon <dbl>
The tobacco industry has long controlled the lives of countless Americans and while their grip is weakening, their impact is prevalent. Through the targeting of low-income counties, tobacco companies have directly impacted the health of poverty-stricken southerners. The outrageously high lung cancer rates in poor southern counties, show the devastating impact of ruthless tobacco campaigning.